FILE - The year 2015 has been the region's warmest on record, in the Arctic and across the globe.

"The Arctic is warming faster than any other part of the planet,” Newton said. “And the Arctic is warming much faster than we thought it would. And it's warming even faster than most of our models predict it will.”

"The old ways of doing things, and the old ways of understanding what's safe and what's not safe, is changing rapidly," said climatologist Rick Thoman at the National Weather Service office in Fairbanks, Alaska.

But what the warming Arctic means for the rest of the planet is still in dispute.

Early this year, blasts of Arctic cold plunged deep into the continental United States. Some researchers said the warming of the Arctic actually may have contributed.

The shrinking temperature difference between the Arctic and the upper latitudes may be affecting the jet stream — the high-altitude winds that blow weather patterns around the Northern Hemisphere. A weaker, wavier jet stream may be pushing air masses off their normal courses, bringing extremes of both cold and heat.

Skeptics remain

But there are plenty of skeptics. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Arctic climate scientist James Overland describes himself as agnostic.

"We don't have a long enough record since the Arctic's been warming to prove that it can affect the jet stream," he said. "But we do see indications that it is."

This week's North Pole heat wave is yet another extreme in a series of extreme events in recent years, Overland added.

"It's one of these surprises. It's another piece of information that things are really changing in the Arctic," he said. "But the weather is so complex, and the climate is so complex, that we have trouble saying there's a one-to-one correlation" between this event and climate change or the current El Niño.

He spent eight years in molecular biology and infectious disease research before deciding that writing about science was more fun than doing it. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a master’s degree in journalism in 2002.